How Do You Archive a Vibe?

On top of running a business that’s open sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, Clarke Cadzow has taken on another massive project—collecting an informal history of Chimes Street, the fabled block on the northern edge of the LSU campus.

When Cadzow strolls into Highland Coffees on a Sunday afternoon, his 3,100-square-foot shop is jam-packed—mostly with students attached to laptops, cell phones, or both. Parking himself at the only free table, he sets down his traveling archive—a large stiff-backed accordion file with a plastic handle. Then he unfurls a sheet of paper, roughly two by three feet, and puts a cup of coffee on it to keep the edges from curling.

This handwritten document encapsulates a history of the neighborhood. On a rough sketch of the block comprising West Chimes, Highland Road, West State, and Lake Street, Cadzow has listed the names and approximate dates of all the businesses in the area, starting with the current occupant and going back in time to the 1920s, when the neighborhood was established.

“I started out thinking I’d make a few phone calls, then I started plotting out where the businesses were located,” says Cadzow. “People often tell you things that are wrong. In order to get the facts straight, I had to do my own research. I hold on to everything, because you never know when it might fill in a piece of the puzzle.”

A New Orleans native with a 1985 business degree from LSU, Cadzow went on to the University of Texas at Austin, where he got a master’s in social work. But by the time he finished in 1988, he had decided to return to Baton Rouge. “I knew LSU needed a coffee shop because I had gone to school there and there were none,” he says.

Cadzow opened his shop at the corner of Highland and Chimes in 1989; he celebrates seventeen years in business this month. In January 1996, he moved into a larger space just behind his former building. In May 2002 he experienced the nightmare of seeing all his hard work go up in flames when a fire spread from The Bayou bar next door. But five months later he reopened his doors.

In July 2003, about fifty local business owners revived the defunct North Gate Merchants Association. North Gate includes the square bounded by Chimes, Highland, State, and Lake streets, plus other Highland Road businesses, roughly extending just past the former University Shopping Center, which has been razed to make way for student apartments.

“We started calling it the North Gates because that term is more descriptive and concrete,” says Cadzow, a member of the association’s board of directors. “But old-timers still know it as Tiger Town.” This month the association plans its second annual festival, to take place on Chimes Street.

Chimes Street curves uphill from Lake Street near Mr. Gatti’s, crosses Highland Road where the actual north gates of the campus are located, and then becomes East Chimes, which is mostly residential. West Chimes is a mix of restaurants, bars, other businesses, and residences, including the Kean’s apartments, an Art Deco building behind a now closed dry-cleaning establishment. (It’s one of the few surviving residential spaces on a street that once had many.)

Since opening his shop, Cadzow has heard stories from former residents and business owners who fondly recall the area. He wanted to know more about the neighborhood, particularly Chimes Street, which has long had a bohemian mystique. In its way, it was the Greenwich Village of Baton Rouge, with a beatnik vibe in the Fifties, a hippie vibe in the Sixties, a druggie vibe in the Seventies. There was a slightly dangerous edge to it—the kind of place that students loved but that made parents nervous.

There was the head shop in the 70s that sold cigarette papers, water pipes, and bongs, and Magoo’s bar with its famous beer-can collection and infamous St. Patrick’s Day street parties featuring green beer.

Among the legendary but more sedate establishments was Louie’s Dutch Mill, opened by Louie Sisk around 1939. The tiny diner held a counter with about ten stools and a couple of small tables. Sisk did the cooking—including cheeseburgers with real cheese. A glass case on the counter held huge homemade chocolate-chip cookies. When Sisk died in 1977, his wife Nana kept the place going for about a year and then sold it to Jimmy Wetherford, who in the late 1980s moved it to its present State Street location, where it is known as Louie’s Café. “It’s the longest continually running restaurant in Baton Rouge,” says Cadzow.

Another staple of Chimes Street life was an apartment building popularly referred to as The Ghetto. (Nobody seems to recall its official name.) A two-story building with twenty-two tiny apartments, it featured paper-thin walls and cheap rent. Legend has it that Hubert Humphrey lived there while working toward a master’s degree at LSU. Writer Katherine Anne Porter also supposedly lived there. The building was torn down a few years ago.

Shortess Paper Books, run by Melvin Shortess and his wife Helen, operated from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, having moved to Chimes from its original location in the University Shopping Center. A restaurant called Edwards’ Orange Bowl did a booming business from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, when it burned down.

Also destroyed by fire was The Bayou bar, which opened in 1977 and went up in smoke in 2002. It featured live music by up-and-coming bands like R.E.M. and was immortalized by Steven Soderbergh in Sex, Lies and Videotape, which won the 1989 Golden Palm award at Cannes. After the film premiered in Baton Rouge, Soderbergh threw a party at The Bayou.

In his seventeen years in the neighborhood, Cadzow has gleaned bits of information from customers who recall its earlier days, and he has compiled an informal history of the area. The pace quickened a year ago, when Trey Pentecost showed Cadzow an aerial photo of the area, circa 1930. A student who lives in the Kean’s apartments, Pentecost is also a photographer who has made studies of the street’s architecture. “Some friends and I even talked about doing a coffee table book,” he says. Pentecost, who works for The Gumbo yearbook, worries about photos getting thrown out when businesses remodel or move: “All it takes is one person to say, ‘Let’s get all this junk out of here,’ and the history is snuffed out.” When he gets the chance, Pentecost checks out old copies of The Gumbo for ads and possible photos of Tiger Town. “I wasn’t that interested in the ads at first,” he says. “But Clarke pointed out that they are historically significant.”

Cadzow and Pentecost wondered what other photographs they might find of the area. Cadzow, who stages four exhibits yearly of photographs and artwork in his shop, immediately decided to hold an exhibit—if he could find the photos.

A notice in Smiley Anders’s Advocate column garnered a few photos and lots of information, particularly from the children of parents who owned businesses in the area. “They literally grew up here,” says Cadzow of Miriam Maxwell Juban, whose father owned Maxwell’s Drugstore at the corner of Highland and Chimes; Suzanne Sabin Terrell, whose father Jack Sabin owned the Goal Post restaurant, famous for making cash loans to students; and Pete LoSavio Jr., whose father owned Chimes Street Billiards in the same building that later housed The Bayou.

Cadzow discovered that the LoSavio family was intimately connected to LSU and Chimes Street. Around 1917, Pete’s grandfather Antonio LoSavio bought land from the Hart family, owners of Magnolia Mound, when they sold off large parcels of the plantation. In the mid-1920s, when LSU moved from downtown to its present site, LoSavio sold some of the land to the university. “He was farming on property where the football stadium is now,” says Cadzow. “And the family had a house where the journalism building is now.”

Next Antonio sold or leased his holdings north of campus, reserving space for the family business and residences. Antonio’s son Simon lived in an apartment above the Co-op Bookstore. Another son, Pete LoSavio Sr., built a two-story brick house on State Street, where he and his family lived downstairs while renting out apartments upstairs.

Besides talking to those who remember the neighborhood, Cadzow has studied city directories and combed ads in back issues of The Gumbo and the Reveille student newspaper. He learned that State Street was originally called Wilson Street. “It was probably named after Woodrow Wilson, since so many other streets off Highland Road are named for presidents,” he says. But Chimes Street, named for the Campanile that tolls every quarter hour, has never been called anything else.

Opening his accordion folder, Cadzow pulls out photocopies of ads. There’s a Reveille ad from the mid-1940s for the Highland Riding Academy, located where the University Shopping Center was later built. “Gentle Riding Horses,” boasts the copy, noting that the stable is open from “6 a.m. till ?”

“You can learn a lot from these,” says Cadzow, sifting through ads for The Ranch restaurant, which offered a 35-cent breakfast that included bacon, egg, grits, toast, and coffee. Another 1930s establishment on Chimes Street was an ice-cream store called Chunk’s Moon Glow Hut. Sparky’s Dribble Inn, probably a snack shop, was owned or managed by 1930s LSU basketball star Sparky Wade. An ad for the Tiger Book Exchange has a hand-drawn, signed map of Chimes Street showing The Playhouse restaurant and the Kean’s apartments and laundry.

“The Playhouse was owned by the Baker brothers who later opened Baker’s Restaurant on Highland next to the Varsity Theater,” says Cadzow. Back in the 30s, the Playhouse offered not only food but also live bands and torch singers.

Although information is plentiful, Cadzow still hopes for more photographic documentation, pointing out that photos can be scanned and returned to the owners. “If the pictures are not gathered soon, they’re going to be lost forever,” he warns.

“The Holy Grail would be a box of photos of the neighborhood,” says Pentecost. “Someone who went around taking street-level pictures. We need those pictures, or even negatives. I’ve got a darkroom and I could print them.”

“I’d definitely like some good clean shots of some of the historic buildings and businesses,” says Cadzow. “But also interior or exterior shots with people, especially some of the places that were popular, like Maxwell’s and the Orange Bowl. Sometimes a little photo doesn’t look like much but you can clean it up and blow it up and it looks great.”

Billy Prescott, owner of Co-op Bookstore, brought in just such a photo, taken in the mid-1930s of his father W. A. Prescott and his partner Nathaniel Chesnut, co-owners of the Co-op. The two men stand proudly in front of a brick building, their store sign overhead. (Coincidentally, it is the same space Highland Coffees now occupies.) When they outgrew the space, Chesnut moved down the street and opened College Supply Bookstore. The brick building that housed the Co-op was destroyed by fire in November 1973.

“This whole complex burned down,” says Cadzow. “There was a massive fire. This was a big, really old building that went back to the 1920s. The Co-op Book Store had been here since the 1930s. [It moved to the University Shopping Center, where it remained until 2003 when it relocated to Burbank Drive.] Crescent Laundry, owned by the Cangelosi family, was here since the 1920s. The original Library restaurant was here. New Generation [record shop] had only been open for a few months.”

While he waits for more photos to appear, Cadzow keeps talking to people; each one gives him more names, so his to-call list keeps growing. And he keeps on digging in the archives. “I’m not a historian,” he says. “I never even took a history course past high school. But I love it.

“I’m convinced this is an important neighborhood,” he says. “Some people wonder how ‘that grungy place’ can be an important neighborhood. But Chimes Street has been here from the moment LSU moved its campus here in the mid-1920s—a place to shop, dine, and be entertained.”

Ruth Laney is fascinated by those she calls Antiquarians—people who are in love with the past. “What distinguishes them all is passion—a love of history and a desire to inhabit the mysterious realm of the long-ago.” A writer based in Baton Rouge, she has written for national magazines. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.